Reading this week:

• Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang (beautiful)
• In the Waves by Rachel Lance

Look. A couple of things. First, I continue to be impressed with the success of my blog post Joe Biden’s Ties (a success not shared by its short update, Joe Biden’s Ties Update). According to WordPress stats, it got like, slightly over two dozen views the other day. Two dozen! This has made me drunk with fame. Expect a biopic shortly. Second, there is a pandemic going on, which has severely restricted the amount of places I can go and then dryly describe for my myriad followers. This has left me pondering if I could maybe even creep up into three dozen viewers on any given day if I dedicate myself entirely to fashion commentary. At the very least, it would save us from being a Chronicle blog. This has made me decide to dedicate this week’s blog in an ode to the greatest fashion in the world, batik.

First off, I apologize; I’m not going to do batik justice here, either in regards to its rich history or to my deep and abiding love for it. I first discovered batik in the usual way: my grandfather died. He was not Indonesian, nor am I entirely sure he ever went to Indonesia, but nonetheless a shirt made of batik wound up in his closet. My dad was too fat for it (that’s not a dig at dad, I’m also too fat for it now, but I used to work out [because the Navy made me]), so I wound up with it. What a revelation! To back up a bit. In case you didn’t follow the link to Wikipedia the first time I wrote batik, what I’m referring to is cloth that has been colored with a wax-resist dyeing technique. If you’re using batik in that general sense, there are a whole lot of types of batik from over large swaths of the world. Given that other parts of the world use other words for it, batik therefore refers more specifically to cloth produced with the technique from Indonesia. It comes in a variety of colorful designs, and people make all sorts of cool clothing out of it, but in my case I exclusively wear batik that has been crafted into shirts.

And I do wear a lot of ’em. Or at least used to. There’s a pandemic on and I can’t stand to muster anything more than a t-shirt for an online class. The picture at the top is a small portion of my total batik collection; I have stowed a large chunk of it away because as I have just complained about there is a pandemic on and I never go anywhere anymore. I wear them for a few reasons. Probably the biggest reason is that they are bold and loud. I remember one day (before my forays into fashion) that I looked at my t-shirt collection and realized they were all blue. And nearly the same shade of blue. This isn’t just a personal fashion choice; look at men (in America at least), any man, and I am willing to bet that he is probably wearing blue. I don’t know what part of that is blue being a flattering color to wear, men being desperately uncreative, or mass-produced fashion having to cater to the lowest common denominator, but men all tend to wear the same boring stuff. There’s no reason to! We can wear whatever we want! We don’t have to wear blue! So batik for me was in large part a major antidote to uninspired dressing.

Another huge reason I like to plug batik is that at some point I decided that it was worth it to look presentable to the world. Batik shirts are a great way to do that. I made this realization at some point with the help of a PutThisOn article I don’t think is up any longer. That article was talking about Aloha/Hawaiian shirts (when I wear batik, it’s usually mistaken for an Aloha shirt, which I also very much love), but made the point that those shirts are actually kinda dressy. Look, I (probably) wouldn’t wear one to a funeral, but the batik shirts I wear (and Aloha shirts) are button-down and have collars. That certainly puts them a step above the t-shirts that my stereotypical blue-clad men wear. And if I come across another man in a batik shirt or an Aloha shirt, I can tell that man has probably put a lot more thought into what he is wearing than somebody dressed in a t-shirt, and out of sheer favoritism I am also going to put him above the polo-shirt clad crowd. And what is the point of formal dress besides an indication that you’ve thought about what you’re wearing and how it applies to the situation in which you will wear it? Also, I meant to point this out earlier, batik is formalwear in Indonesia anyways, so it’s not sorta-kinda formal, it is formal.

The most difficult part of my passion for batik is that it is hard to get. I have bought nearly the entirety of my batik collection on ebay. At some point, I think I was (I might still be) the exclusive buyer of size-17 batik keris (my preferred brand) shirts on ebay. I have an alert set up. In good times, I get an email nearly every morning. I think the pandemic must have significantly slowed the flow of batik into the United States because pickings have been sadly slim. There have been a limited number of other ways I have been able to obtain batik. At one point, a buddy of mine had long been suffering under a deluge of batik, actually. I was jealous of his lifestyle, which involved having an uncle that sent him boxes of batik shirts unsolicited. Both my buddy and his uncle were Indonesian, as way of explanation. While we were in closer proximity, he would pass his surplus to me. This was amazing.

At only one time in my life have I been able to buy batik shirts directly from a store. This was in Singapore. I did not know I was going to go to Singapore when I set out on this particular trip (it was on a submarine, and things are hush-hush on submarines, and also sometimes disorganized), but as soon as I heard we were headed there I felt my batik dreams were destined to come quickly true. I was crushed to not find every street lined with batik stores, but when I finally found one I ran across the street to shop there. At the time I was under the impression you could be caned in Singapore for jaywalking, but such was my dedication to bright and colorful patterns that I was willing to risk physical injury for it. Based on the reaction of the erstwhile shopkeeper, I am willing to say I was the most enthusiastic buyer of batik he had seen in quite some time. Maybe just the least canny. At any rate, it was heaven.

So, uh, yeah. That’s what I got to say about batik. It’s bold. It’s beautiful. It’s a step up from whatever you’re likely wearing (my super amazing girlfriend disagrees [hi!]). Give it a go! Just not in size 17 from ebay. That’s for me.